The Obama Administration insists there’s nothing secret about the Iran nuclear deal, even as it claims not to have read two crucial side deals Tehran has struck with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Confidential agreements, but no secrets” is the way top U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman describes the deals, which are thought to concern the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programs.

Try parsing that distinction. And while you’re at it, consider that there might be additional separate agreements we haven’t heard about. We raise the possibility after speaking with Rep. Mike Pompeo, the Kansas Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, and who more-or-less stumbled on the two side deals when the deputy director of the IAEA disclosed their existence to him and Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) in a meeting in Vienna.

There’s nothing like a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to keep body and soul together while one is having visions about changing the world. I wouldn’t know the pleasure.

Powell’s Books is an Oregon bookstore chain with an affiliated store in Chicago. Its main store is in Portland. It is New York City’s Strand Bookstore of the West. Each of these stores boasts miles and floors of new and used books. It is easy to spend a whole day in one of these stores, once lured inside. I visited the Portland store once, but spent many happy hours in The Strand.

Powell’s recently posted a promotional ad on its site, “25 Women to read before you die.” The list was prefaced with:

Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers. That doesn’t sound like science to me.

Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?

The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact. Hillary Clinton’s speech about climate change on Monday in Des Moines, Iowa, included an attack on “deniers.”

The phrases are in no way applicable to the science of Earth’s climate. The climate is an enormously complex system, with a very large number of inputs and outputs, many of which we don’t fully understand—and some we may well not even know about yet. To note this, and to observe that there is much contradictory evidence for assertions of a coming global-warming catastrophe, isn’t to “deny” anything; it is to state a fact. In other words, the science is unsettled—to say that we have it all wrapped up is itself a form of denial. The essence of scientific inquiry is the assumption that there is always more to learn.

Samuel “Sandy Stocking Stuffer” Berger is a cur…from 2004WASHINGTON – Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger – under criminal investigation for sneaking top-secret documents out of the National Archives in his pants legs and, possibly, his socks – abruptly quit yesterday as an adviser to John Kerry.

http://nypost.com/2004/07/21/stocking-stuffer-berger-quits-kerry/

A former national security adviser to President Bill Clinton wrote an email to Hillary Clinton in 2009 advising the then-secretary of state how to deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he continued to “be the obstacle” in negotiations with Palestinians.

The email from Samuel Berger advised Clinton on how to navigate the waters with Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Abu Mazen.

Many more classified emails identified as Congress is notified
The U.S. intelligence community is bracing for the possibility that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email account contains hundreds of revelations of classified information from spy agencies and is taking steps to contain any damage to national security, according to documents and interviews Thursday.

The top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committee have been notified in recent days that the extent of classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server was likely far more extensive than the four emails publicly acknowledged last week as containing some sensitive spy agency secrets.

A U.S. official directly familiar with the notification, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said the notification of possibly hundreds of additional emails with classified secrets came from the State Department Freedom of Information Act office to the Office of Inspector General for the Director of National Intelligence.

Obama has decided that two wildly unpopular policies, one foreign and one domestic, will be the final legacy of his wildly unpopular administration. The domestic policy is gun control. The foreign policy is Iranian nukes. While Americans will be disarmed, Iran will be getting ready for its ballistic missiles.

Ramming through wildly unpopular policies is what this administration does best. More than anything else, this administration will be remembered for the mix of bullying, smears, pop culture distractions, outright lies, bureaucratic sabotage and blatant lawbreaking with which it achieved its policy goals.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday to answer questions about the Iran nuclear deal, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said he couldn’t determine whether Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had religious motivations to destroy the Great Satan and the Little Satan.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) first asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, “Do you believe the Iranians have been trying to build a bomb or a nuclear power program for peaceful purposes all these years?”

“I believe they have a militarization aspiration,” Dempsey carefully replied.

Then:

GRAHAM: Who’s the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, Secretary Carter? Who calls the shots?

“Trump’s presidential candidacy is yet another symptom of the decline of American culture and the degeneration of the public square into a freak show largely featuring sinister authoritarians like Hillary Clinton [5] on the one hand and puffed-up clowns on the other. Trump, of course, is in the latter camp, but he plays into the hands of the former.”

It’s hard not to be in Donald Trump’s corner when his targets are the likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

McCain may justifiably be indignant over Trump’s stupid and clumsy savaging of him for having such poor taste as to be captured in Vietnam, but the Arizona senator displayed judgment that was just as poor when he claimed [1] Michele Bachmann’s entirely reasonable [2] questions about Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood ties manifested an “ignorance” that “defame[d] the spirit of the nation.”

So when it comes to John McCain and Donald Trump, it’s blowhard versus boor. But that doesn’t excuse Trump. His current position at the top of the polls — and the very real possibility that he could continue to bestride the narrow Republican field like a Colossus while his petty rivals walk under his huge legs and peep about to find themselves dishonorable graves — is a sign of how much American politics has turned into an Oprah show of celebrity worship, lurid grandstanding, logorrheic superficiality, and tabloid scandalmongering.

What happens to the Iran nuclear deal if Iran already has a nuclear weapon?

Both Iran and North Korea were part of the A.Q. Kahn proliferation network, and bilateral trade in oil and weapons has continued despite UN resolutions designed to stop it. Ballistic missile cooperation is documented, and nuclear cooperation has been an unspoken theme in Washington. Pyongyang helped Damascus, Iran’s ally, build a secret reactor. There are reports that North Korean experts visited Iran in May to help Iran with its missile program. Pressed by reporters on the subject of North Korea-Iran nuclear cooperation a few weeks ago, even the State Department acknowledged that it takes reports of such cooperation seriously.